Friday, March 29, 2013

Piero della Francesca, Robert Bresson,Yasujiro Ozu

Saint Monica by Piero della Francesca

In his review of the Piero della Francesca show at the Frick, “The Nobel Dreams of Piero” (The New York Review of Books, 3/21/13),
Walter Kaiser quotes the great 20th Century Polish poet Zbigniew
Herbert. Herbert was by the way known particularly for the character of Mr.
Cogito, whose soubriquet derives from Descartes. “The Principle of tranquility
does not lie merely in architectural balance,” Kaiser quotes Herbert as saying.
“It is a principle of inner order. Piero understood that excess movement and
expression both destroy the visual painted space and compress the painting’s
time to a momentary scene, a flash of existence. His stoic heroes are
constrained and impassive. The stilled leaves, the hue of the first earthly
dawn, the unstruck hour, give the things Piero created ontological
indestructibility.” Herbert’s last sentence is actually rather awkward, but why throw the baby out with the bath water? It brilliantly ties the
work of the quattrocento painter to the dream of classicism espoused by the
great French film director Robert Bresson in Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and also his Japanese counterpart Yasujiro Ozu, in Tokyo Story (l953). In talking about the aesthetics of a great 15th century Renaissance painter, a modern Polish poet is inadvertently furthering our understanding of the spirituality of two great figures of modern cinema. We might say that Piero helps us understand Bresson and Ozu or that Bresson and Ozu help us to retrospectively understand the work of one of the great Italian masters.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.